Dr. Jeffrey GladdenFounder & CEO of Gladden Longevity

Lyme Disease Diagnosis Using Urine Biomarkers 🔍

30 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains a novel diagnostic approach for Lyme disease that diverges from traditional blood‑based testing. He describes how the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium continuously sheds surface proteins and cell‑wall components—up to 40% during cell division—into the host’s environment. A substantial portion of these shed materials is filtered by the kidneys, accumulates in the bladder, and is expelled in urine. Leveraging this physiological pathway, the method uses urine as the sample matrix, concentrates the urine to enrich these biomarkers, and then detects them to determine the presence of the pathogen. This urine‑based strategy is presented as a more direct and potentially more sensitive way to diagnose active Borrelia infection.

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And so for Lyme disease, for Borrelia, what we do is a completely different approach. So instead of looking at blood, you know, if you look at the microbiology of the pathogen, one of the things that it does is it's constantly shedding surface part of its cell wall. So either proteins or components of the structural cell wall into its environment, and over 40% can be shed when the cell divides, right? And so that gets left into the environment in various forms they actually get cleared, a significant amount gets cleared by the kidneys and aggregates in the bladder and excreted in urine. So the approach that we take is very different. We're actually looking, we use urine as a sample because this is a great matrix and there's been a wealth of information that shows this is useful for diagnostics. And we concentrate it and then use that, those, you know, biomarkers and detect them in the urine to determine whether or not the pathogen is present.